Articles
The creator economy magazineAnalyses of the European creator economy from primary sources. Pick a topic and read.
A24 took down fan-made merch and games. Only the film’s director stopped it
A24’s Backrooms film grossed $384 million, its best result ever. Then the studio’s automated copyright system began removing fan merch and games it does not own, and the 21-year-old director was the one who stopped it. The brand is held by the one the community trusts.
LinkedIn advises creators to start newsletters
Investors are backing email as owned distribution. Substack is valued at $1.1 billion, and beehiiv publishers sent more than 28 billion emails in a year. The difference between a feed and a list is who holds the subscriber’s address, and on LinkedIn that is not the creator.
Bartlett and MrBeast are heading to Shark Tank
Steven Bartlett and MrBeast will sit as guest investors in the eighteenth series of Shark Tank on ABC. Bartlett’s company Steven.com is valued at around $425 million. Creators are moving from the pitch to the chair that decides where the money goes.
Connecticut is turning creators into an economy. Europe treats them as culture
Connecticut’s governor launched C4, a state platform for finding creators by field and audience. The state describes creators in the language of economic development. Europe puts €380 million a year into creative work through Creative Europe, but frames it as culture.
Netflix buys Affleck’s AI for $587 million and takes over post-production
Netflix paid about $587 million for Ben Affleck’s AI startup and disclosed the price only in a regulatory filing. It is bringing the footage-repair tool and the whole team in-house. Netflix used generative AI on around 300 titles this year.
Google connected Colin & Samir with Lexus through their podcast
The Colin & Samir Start Over series for Lexus began when a Google employee heard their podcast and knew Lexus was looking for creators. The creators supplied the concept and kept control. The value lay in matching supply with demand, and the budget stays on the platform.
Podcasters agree on how to count listeners
The Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting (AMP) is introducing four shared metrics for plays and advertising. The long argument over whether a download counts as a listen is ending. The Czech market does not yet have a shared standard.
beehiiv adds communities and wants to run the whole creator business
At its first Summer Release event, beehiiv launched Community, an AI Copilot and programmatic advertising. Tyler Denk is positioning the platform as Shopify for creators and wants it to run their entire content business.
Second-hand in the US grows four times faster than new fashion
A thirty-year cultural cycle has reached the 1990s, and the generation that lived through them now has spending power. Creators and films are switching on old catalogues and second-hand clothes again, and nostalgia is turning into business.
Gap launches Hailey Bieber jeans. Its archive and creators drive the comeback
Gap is drawing on its own 1990s cultural archive and hiring creators who bring their own audiences. The Hailey Bieber collection and last quarter’s numbers show how a legacy brand is buying back relevance.
A year after Unilever, creator marketing’s ambition outpaces measurement
Fernando Fernández promised last March that half of Unilever’s digital budget would go to social, with twenty times more creators. A year on, Unilever has published no accounts, and brands lack the data to prove results. The ambition has outrun measurement.
The Commission flags Meta's addictive design as a DSA breach. Reach is at stake
On 10 July the European Commission preliminarily found that the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook breaches the DSA. Meta faces fines of up to 6% of turnover. The dispute is the first to concern the reach mechanics that creators and brands in Europe rely on.